Everything Cheese

I have this problem — I love to cook, and more often than not, I find myself frantically running all over the city trying to find ingredients for whatever culinary experiment I happen to be conducting.
A few weeks back, I decided to try to make a beer and cheese soup. Finding the beer was not a problem (for some odd reason, I know where all the liquor stores are in my neighborhood), but locating the cheese was more difficult. I needed 2 cups of Gruyère, cubed. A whirlwind circuit of the usual grocery stores (Sobey’s, Save On, etc) only yielded a few thin slices of Gruyère for what would have turned out to be an insanely expensive soup, had I gone that route.
Fortunately, I found salvation on Unilocal.Two specialty cheese shops appeared before me (well, on my screen, at least). Since Everything Cheese turned out to be closer to my home (south side, represent!), I decided to check them out. Finding the store turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as I ended up taking a couple of wrong turns, which caused me to enjoy an impromptu tour of Riverbend.
Once I found the shop, I was completely awed by the vast array of cheese that appeared before my eyes. I am by no means a cheese connoisseur, but even I could tell that this was an impressive collection of coagulated milk products.
The staff were friendly and extremely helpful, and I was even more impressed when I got home and realized that they had been eeriely accurate in judging how big of a slab of cheese to sell me — Once I took the knife to it, it was precisely two cups, cubed.
One other thing that I liked was the assortment of cheese paraphenelia — serving trays, cutting implements, fondue sets, et cetera.
Price wise, the cheese turned out to be a great deal less expensive than I thought it would be. I wasn’t paying attention to the prices on the other products, but I would imagine them to be equally reasonable.

Everything Cheese lives up to its name and then some. It is a bit difficult to find for those unfamiliar with the twisty-​turning confusion of roads in the southwest, but its humble strip mall home conceals a veritable king’s ransom of cheese. Edmonton already has several excellent sources for cheese (including the Italian Center Shop and Paddy’s Cheese), but Everything Cheese boasts a staggering selection of British and Québécois fromage. A must-​try: Double Gloucester, a British cheese made only of the milk from the Gloucester breed of cattle.

I’ve got to say that Edmonton has a lot of passionate people in various streams of life. Stemming from a passion for cheese perfection, Everything Cheese recently opened (I believe 2 months back) in the 53^rd ave exit area off Whitemud. Of course, I can’t quite blame them for their location. It’s not very easy to start up with an idea and get the best location. Although they are in the middle of nowhere, I’m going to not hold it against them.
They have a smaller selection of cheeses than, say, Paddy’s International Cheese mart on 124^th street, but I do believe that sufficient patronage will increase their variety and supply. I loved sampling thin slices of their cheese and I must say that the cheese they had at this store was very fresh and tasty. What I like is that customers can create accounts here and that helps in keeping track of the cheeses you have tried.
I would certainly add one more star if they ended up with a bigger variety of cheese, IN PARTICULAR, soft french cheeses. They had a few, but didn’t have enough of the soft cheese varieties (Brie types, St. André cheese, Camembert etc.). I’m certain that it was an off night for them and I will end up going there again and re-​reviewing.
I was quite happy to see three varieties of Pecorino cheese (Italian hard sheep cheese) and I went with the local, Albertan variety. However, I’ve not easily found Pecorino Romano and Pecorino Tuscano in the same place, before (maybe I’m wrong, but I think even Italian Centre shop has only Romano).
I also bought a spanish bleu cheese that was uniquely strong in flavor, firmer variety of bleues and definitely makes me want to go open my refrigerator right now and have a piece of it. :-) Maybe I’ll do that now …